A NIGHT IN ELY

THE Isle of Ely, with the city in its midst, and the cathedral in the midst of the city, is more ecclesiastical than Rome itself. Until comparatively recent times the Bishop was a petty prince therein, exercising powers of life and death. He did not indeed sit in the courts himself, and himself sentence to the block and the gallows, any more than did the Pope himself consign offenders to the flames. The secular power was committed to a 'Temporal Steward,' who held his office for life, and discharged the functions of High Sheriff, and the Bishop washed his hands of all blood-guiltiness.

The courts of justice were, however, held in the Bishop's name, and the gaols were institutions under his jurisdiction. The Bishop appointed the municipal authorities and the justices of peace. From the High Sheriff to the town-crier, all derived their authority by commission from the Bishop.

As every acre of land in the isle and far away into the fen belonged to either Bishop or Dean and Chapter, there were no county magnates near, and no country gentry at all. Nay, even in the city itself there was no gentry of independent position. In Rome there are princes who have their territories. In Ely there were not even squires.

Accordingly, the ecclesiastical dignitaries lived very high up in roseate clouds and in an ethereal atmosphere, far above the clay land where grubbed and wriggled the professional men and the shopkeepers.

Perhaps the fact of being so completely under ecclesiastical government paralysed all initiative in Ely, and rendered the inhabitants helpless in cases of emergency. The citizens were but overgrown babies. The lawyer, the surgeon, the M.D., the surveyor, the architect, were accustomed to be swaddled and given suck by the Right Reverend Father the Bishop, or the Very Reverend the Dean, or the Venerable the Archdeacon; and all the officials, the temporal steward, and the justices, and the chief constable, were wont to go in leading-strings.

And they were such good babies. They always thought as the reverend fathers thought; they never cried and kicked; and the air of the Fens must have been salubrious, for they had all ravenous appetites for the fat of the land, which fell from the ecclesiastical tables. At the time of our tale, co-operative stores had not been so much as thought of. The Bishop, the Dean, and the canons got their groceries, their drugs, their wines, and their stationery from the Ely tradesmen. In return for their custom, these tradesmen professed the strictest churchmanship and the staunchest Toryism.

The system of appointment to offices in Ely was distinctively ecclesiastical. The magistrates were bespectacled and bewigged officials connected by marriage with some of the members of the Chapter. The constables were nominated for their general piety, or because they were burdened with large families. The watchmen were pensioned cripples or asthmatic incapables, whose utmost achievement was to crawl about at night and proclaim the hour. Everything in the city was managed for the residents by a benevolent and beneficent ecclesiastical authority, which exhibited its benevolence and beneficence by conferring offices, not on such as showed efficiency, but on such men as were incompetent to earn a livelihood in any profession or business that demanded the exercise of brain or of muscle.

When the turbulent crew from Littleport arrived in Ely, and the rumour circulated that other Fen centres were sending their contingents of the disaffected to the capital of the Fens, neither magistrates nor constables were prepared to take prompt action to protect the town and stop the spread of disturbance. Orders were indeed issued to have the minster bell rung, to summon all sober, law-abiding citizens to unite for the common defence, but, although the bell pealed its summons, no one obeyed it, for no one knew where the rallying-point was, or what was to be done by those summoned.

The temporal steward was in bed with a mustard poultice on his chest and a dose of sweet nitre in his stomach. Consequently, when a messenger from the Deanery came to request that he would do something, the wife of the temporal steward was able to point out that he was perspiring freely and the poultice drawing vigorously. To leave his bed and the house was, therefore, out of the question.

There was no deputy sheriff to fill the place which the sheriff was incapacitated from filling. The vacancy had not been filled up, because the Bishop was hesitating, balancing the claims of one who was stone-blind against one who was stone-deaf. The prelate himself was absent on a confirmation tour, and he had taken his chaplains with him, and, what was more to the point, his butler—a man who did most of the thinking in sublunary matters for his master. The constables then in Ely were few. The chief constable, Mr. Edwards, was the manager of Mortlock's bank, and in the interests of the bank he had come to the resolution to keep in the background so as in no way to excite the angry passions of the mob. Another constable had swallowed a fish-bone, and this was being extracted by a fellow constable. A fourth was at the moment incapacitated for work by one of his constitutional and chronic fits of the hiccups. It was precisely because he suffered from this affliction that the benevolent and beneficent ecclesiastical authority had nominated him to, and invested him with, the office of constable.

As the combined municipal and collegiate forces of watchmen were unprepared or unable to cope with the approaching masses of men, the Dean sent off his coachman on a carriage horse to Bury St. Edmund's, to invoke the aid of the military stationed there. The mob from Littleport entered the town, as already said, preceded by the waggon, in which were placed heavy wash guns loaded with slugs. To announce its arrival a volley was fired, and the slugs rattled on the tiles and broke a few windows.

No sooner had the Littleport body entered Ely, than it learned to its disappointment that nothing had been heard of the Isleham and Swaffham contingents.

In fact, discouragement had dissolved these at the onset. The small landowner, Cutman, who had undertaken to lead the detachment from Isleham, had reconsidered the matter, and resolved that heading a riot could do him no possible good, and might do him very considerable harm. The men assembled at the Duck at the appointed hour, waited, and, as he did not appear, became uneasy, supposing that he had been alarmed; they also reconsidered the matter, and, coming to much the same conclusion as Cutman, dispersed quietly to their several homes.

The Swaffham men were also defaulters. The tidings of what was meditated had been communicated to a large farmer there, and when the rabble approached, he met them dauntlessly, along with his stalwart sons and some trusty serving-men, all armed with blunderbusses. He addressed the mob, and, by his bold front and resolute bearing, not only prevented them from attacking his house, but persuaded them to break up and abandon their undertaking.

The Littleport body, swelled by stragglers, and also by men who had lived in the suburbs of Ely, formed a considerable host, and had they been under efficient discipline, and had they known exactly what demands to make, and how to enforce their demands, might have produced serious results.

As it was, they did a certain amount of mischief, and took a certain amount of loot, but all in an aimless manner; and in looting or wrecking forgot the ostensible reasons for their assembly and purpose of marching upon Ely.

No sooner were they in the town than the mob resolved itself, without order given, into two detachments, whereof one attacked the flour-mills, and the other broke into the victuallers' shops to seize on their stores of ham, bacon, and sausages.

There was a large soak-mill in the lower part of the town, managed by a man named Rickwood. This was the first assailed.

By this time the magistrates, at the advice and exhortation of their wives, had plucked up sufficient courage to venture to parley with the rioters. There were but three or four of these in the place; one was a retired steward who was almost stone-deaf, the other two were clergymen. These magistrates inquired of the fen-men what were their demands, and were answered with confused cries for higher wages, cheaper bread, and for money to be scattered among them.

Terrified by the shouts and the menacing attitude of the mob, they entered into negotiations with them, and offered to raise a certain sum of money from the inhabitants to satisfy their illegal demands. But the rioters could not agree as to the price at which they would desist from violence, nor could they wait with patience till the magistrates had collected the sum offered.

Accordingly, the conference was broken up, and the mob proceeded to smash Rickwood's windows and to beat open his doors.

The miller was not, as it chanced, at home himself, and his wife entered into parley with the rabble from a window. They demanded fifty pounds, and threatened, unless it were paid, to proceed to set fire to the mill, and the miller's habitation adjoining.

Mrs. Rickwood, in terror, promised the sum, but said that she had not so much coin in the house. She would send her son for the money to the bank.

'No! no! Come yourself!' shouted the men, and proceeded to demolish the windows.

Accordingly, Mrs. Rickwood descended, and in deadly fear issued forth into the street, after having committed the mill to the care of her son.

The banker was also, as already said, chief constable, and in the interest of Messrs. Mortlock was remaining at home, and sitting in his back parlour.

When the mob reached his house, which was one with the bank, loud cries were raised for him, and Mrs. Rickwood knocked at the front door. After long waiting, he appeared in the doorway, as white as chalk. Mrs. Rickwood then entreated him to furnish her with fifty sovereigns in gold, in order that she might purchase immunity for her mill from the insurgent peasantry.

'Nothing in the world will induce me to do this!' exclaimed the chief constable heroically. Whereupon a stone was thrown at him, and struck his head, so that a little blood flowed.

'That is to say,' said Edwards, 'nothing save compulsion;' and he hastened within to find the money.

The second body of rioters in the meantime was engaged in sacking the grocery-shops and provision-stores. One of the magistrates, the Rev. Mr. Metcalf, endeavoured to calm the mob by an assurance that he would induce the owners of the shops to purchase their immunity. But he was successful in two instances only. In some the rabble took the money, and, notwithstanding, plundered the shops. Then a second mill was attacked, but, on ten pounds being produced, no further violence was done to it.

The night was dark. The rioters went round requisitioning faggots and coals, and soon an immense bonfire was kindled before the cathedral west front, and a second in face of St. Mary's church. The first lighted up the splendid pile, bringing out every detail of sculpture, and twinkling in the glass that filled the Norman windows.

Round this fire the young men and girls danced. Some of the men had carried provisions to the Galilee, and prepared for a carouse. The taverns had been attacked very early, and the publicans had been constrained to allow the rioters free use of their liquor.

As Mark had assured Kerenhappuch, Ephraim Beamish had pushed his way after the rabble, undeterred by the treatment he had received at its hands, his enthusiasm unquenched by his plunge in the icy water. As there was no organisation in the mob, he was suffered to rejoin it with an occasional protest only, but Chevell, Harley, and Tansley would not allow him to remount the waggon.

No sooner did Beamish find that a great body of the insurgents were setting themselves to eat, drink, and revel about the great fire in front of the cathedral, than he got a chair, and endeavoured to harangue them, to point out to them that they were throwing away their occasion, neglecting to enforce their grievances on the employers of labour, and that they were making enemies among all the well-disposed by their capricious and lawless proceedings. But directly his face was discerned by the flicker of the fire, and his voice recognised, beaten back by the cathedral walls, than shouts were raised of, 'That's the fellow who stole the Cheap Jack girl's money. We want no preaching here.'

His chair was tripped up, and he was sent sprawling in the dirt.

He rose angry and disconcerted. The movement of which he was the instigator, and of which he had been appointed director by vote of the men, had rejected his direction, and was taking its own suicidal course.

The fens immediately surrounding the isle on which Ely stood were farmed by men whose homesteads were on the gault excrescence that formed the isle. According to the preconcerted scheme, the Union of Fen Labourers was to proceed to these farmsteads one by one, to exact of the farmers a contribution to the cause, and an oath to raise the wage.

It was true enough that two or three farms had been visited which lay to right and left of the road from Littleport to Ely, but no sooner had the men reached the Fen capital, than they forgot their purpose, directed their attention to the provision-shops, waylaid and blackmailed passengers, broke into the taverns, and thought only of eating, drinking, and making money. They entirely neglected the scheme that had been agreed to. Not a single farm in the isle was molested, not a single farmer coerced.